A number of single reel cartridge/drive arrangements have been proposed. However, most of these are directed to mass storage systems such as the IBM 3480 system and or are associated with mass storage arrangements such as mentioned in U.S. Pat. No. 4,972,277 to Sills et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 5,454,681 to Baur. Examples of the cartridge/drive arrangements used in the above mentioned systems can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,202,809 to Dodt et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,155,639 to Platter et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 4,987,504 to Inoue; U.S. Pat. No. 4,826,101 to Smith, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,679,747 to Smith;
However, these drive arrangements tend to be both complex and bulky due to the manner in which the ends of the tapes are captured by a pivotal arm type of arrangement upon insertion of a cartridge into a drive. This bulkiness, while not being significant problem in the above mentioned mass storage systems, wherein the banks of tapes dwarf the tape drive, does however, tend to inhibit their use in personal computing systems. That is to say, these type of arrangements cannot be readily incorporated into the relatively small housings (often referred to as "towers") in which the CPU, hard disc, floppy disc, CD drives etc., are disposed.
Accordingly, there is a need for a highly compact arrangement wherein so called "streamer" types of tape and the like, can be withdrawn from a single reel cartridge and threaded into an operative configuration in the drive, ready for the transfer of large quantities of data.